Early results show Ally.ai capabilities could boost speed,
drive team creativity and productivity
CHARLOTTE, N.C., Nov. 16,
2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ally Financial Inc. (NYSE: ALLY)
announced today the early results of an experimental generative AI
use case with its marketing team designed to help understand the
real-world impact the technology could have on campaign development
and employee productivity. Using the Ally.ai platform's large
language model (LLM) chat and prompt functionality, a select group
of marketers were able to reduce the time needed to produce
creative campaigns and content by up to 2-3 weeks and reported an
average time savings of 34%, compared to typical processes without
AI.
Additional results reported from the month-long experimental
program include:
- The reduction in time needed for content creation and other
marketing outputs of up to 2-3 weeks was primarily found in the
early stages of the creative process in tasks such as research,
first drafts and naming exercises
- The 34% time savings on tasks when using the Ally.ai interface
could equate to an annual savings of almost 3,000 hours across the
participant team
- More than 80 prompts developed by participants during the test
had an 87% usefulness rate, showing the value of prompt engineering
training for teammates and the effectiveness of outputs that could
be used in assigned work
- Users also noted a prompt accuracy rate of 81%, signifying that
they received the right type of content or response outputs from
the Ally.ai platform to complete their assignments
- Participants also saw usefulness and accuracy in outputs when
using Ally.ai for data analysis, quality controls and search engine
optimization (SEO)
"The best marketing teams know the art of evolution, which
includes evaluating and testing of transformative technologies,"
said Andrea Brimmer, Chief Marketing
and Public Relations Officer at Ally. "The early results
demonstrate how AI could enable our talent to focus on creative
tasks that needed the most human involvement, while speeding up the
routine efforts of our day-to-day work. We look forward to the
continued exploration of generative AI and learning more about how
the technology can assist our team."
Ally.ai, the company's proprietary, cloud-based AI platform that
serves as a secure, private bridge between enterprise-grade LLMs
and Ally's data and AI applications, launched in June 2023. The test with marketing comes on the
heels of Ally's pilot with its Customer Care and Experience group
where Ally.ai was used to quickly and accurately summarize customer
service calls, helping associates focus their energy on more
meaningful customer interactions and reduce the time needed to
service and close a customer inquiry.
Read more about Ally.ai and the Customer Care use case here.
Both use cases reflect a commitment to Ally's core principles
for the enterprise use of AI: initially focusing on use cases that
support employee productivity and optimizing internal business
processes; providing human intervention and controls for oversight
and training; protecting against the disclosure of personal
identifying information and prohibiting third party model providers
from using Ally data to train their foundational models.
"The purpose of building Ally.ai in-house, and with foundational
data, cloud and network infrastructure already in place, is to
scale its use throughout the organization while also keeping a
close eye on potential risks and opportunities for new use cases,"
said Sathish Muthukrishnan, Chief
Information, Data and Digital Officer at Ally. "The value that our
marketing colleagues could get from Ally.ai demonstrates how
important cross-functional collaboration is to the development of
enterprise AI capabilities."
Generative AI in Marketing: Supporting Productivity
In addition to the preset system prompts and security features
already embedded in Ally.ai, the platform needed a place where
teammates could engage with the LLM directly. Understanding that
most LLMs and generative AI applications are good for
summarization, content creation, ideation/brainstorming, and
information analysis, Ally's developers built an open prompt user
interface (UI) for Ally.ai that would allow teammates to do two
types of work: chat directly with the secured LLM and also develop
specialized prompts that could be saved, used again, and shared
with colleagues based on their accuracy and usefulness rates.
Teammates could change features of the platform depending on the
work they did, including toggling between chat and prompt mode,
adjusting prompt length as well as the model's creative parameters
and vocabulary. The participant team frequently used Ally.ai as a
starting point for creative development, specifically for first
drafts of advertising copy, video scripts or social media posts, or
enhancing human-driven ideas that originated from brainstorms or
naming exercises.
An example: the content team performed a test of Ally.ai by
providing the platform with a transcript of a podcast that featured
an Ally executive. The team asked the platform to create the first
draft of a 750-word article for Ally's
Conversationally blog with the information provided,
plus direction to incorporate the most insightful, informative and
entertaining parts that would be relevant to consumers. While the
Ally.ai output required editing and the finesse of Ally's content
writers and it still went through Ally's well-established
regulatory review processes, having a quick first draft done in 15
minutes helped reduce the total time needed to create and edit the
blog article from four hours to just one.
"We look at Ally.ai as an assistant that will be able to help
our teammates with faster and smarter project delivery, which leads
to a better experience for our customers," Brimmer said. "In
several different instances, our content writers were able to use
thoughtfully crafted prompts to either start up the creative
process or help extend the distribution of content to new channels.
Anytime we can reduce the time to publish while also letting our
creatives do what they do best, that means a lot in our
fast-moving, competitive environment."
Dig deeper on how the Ally Marketing team tested AI on the Ally
Tech blog.
With the Ally.ai UI in place, Ally teammates can be trained to
use it for the exploration and development of approved business use
cases. The opportunity to learn more about AI and train using the
platform has created a positive energy inside the company. Earlier
this month, Ally hosted its second AI Day – a half-day dedicated to
education and knowledge sharing around AI – with almost 1,000
teammates from multiple business units in attendance.
"You can't escape the conversation around AI, so we are taking
hold of that momentum and using it as a springboard to continue to
explore new use cases that will drive AI adoption internally while
supporting business goals," Muthukrishnan said. "Right now, there
are more than 100 use cases being carefully evaluated throughout
the enterprise. While not all of them will pass our rigorous
testing, we remain optimistic about what AI can bring to our
teammates at Ally and to the financial services industry."
For more insights from the technology team at Ally, including
how the team is exploring new innovations like quantum computing
and digital accessibility, visit https://ally.tech.
About Ally Financial
Ally Financial Inc. (NYSE: ALLY) is a financial services company
with the nation's largest all-digital bank and an industry-leading
auto financing business, driven by a mission to "Do It Right" and
be a relentless ally for customers and communities. The company
serves more than 11 million customers through a full range of
online banking services (including deposits, mortgage,
point-of-sale personal lending, and credit card products) and
securities brokerage and investment advisory services. The company
also includes a robust corporate finance business that offers
capital for equity sponsors and middle-market companies, as well as
auto financing and insurance offerings. For more information,
please visit www.ally.com and follow @allyfinancial.
For more information and disclosures about Ally,
visit https://www.ally.com/#disclosures.
For further images and news on Ally, please
visit http://media.ally.com.
Contacts:
Laurie Hurst
Ally Communications (Media)
media@ally.com
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SOURCE Ally Financial